Tales From The Helpdesk

Mail Tagging

When you create or select a rule which blocks then any mail item which matches the rule is rejected and is never delivered to you.

You run a risk, however, that there will be “false positives”. These are real, wanted mails from a sender which for some reason has matched the rules. Some of the external DNS blocklists we offer are more likely than others to cause this. Remember we don’t control the blocking lists, we just make them available to you.

If you suspect that your particular choice might be blocking we recommend you consider using a rule in warn mode. When a mail item transgresses a rule in warn mode, the mail is still delivered to you, but it is tagged as “probably spam”. We add a line like this to the message header section of the mail item:-

X-SPAM-Warning: see https://tidymail.co.uk/spamwarning.cgi?h=12.203.206.219&v=127.0.0.9&l=dnsbl.njabl.org

This line is ignored by any software not explicitly expecting to see it, but it should be preserved intact by any mail system passing the mail on to you. Thus once we’ve tagged a mail, you should always be able to see the tag. As you can see, the tag line includes a URL (the bit starting “https”). If you cut’n’paste that into a web browser, you will get a more detailed explanation of what rule has been broken by the mail item.

In order to separate the “tagged” mail from your “clean” non-spam mail, you will need to set up a rule in your mail client which picks up any items containing the string “X-Spam-Warning” and puts them in a “Spamtrapped mail” folder. We suggest you delete the contents of this folder every day – but not before glancing quickly down the list to see if any of the tagged items were really “good”.

If you do get mail from a particular co-respondant which is being tagged, you can either choose to stop using the blocking list in question, or you can add the user’s email address or his whole domain to the “Known Good” list. i.e. you put in a rule which says “I always wish to recive mail from fred@bloggs.com” even if it appears to be spam, using the Known rules.